Camp Funston: Where the Pandemic May Have Started

In the spring of nineteen eighteen, an Army cook named Albert Gitchell reported to the infirmary here at Camp Funston with a sore throat and a fever. By noon, more than one hundred soldiers had identical symptoms. Within three weeks, eleven hundred men were sick.

Epidemiologists believe this was the first recorded outbreak of what the world would call the Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed an estimated fifty million people globally, and dropped American life expectancy by twelve years in a single year. Camp Funston, nestled inside Fort Riley, was processing nearly fifty-six thousand troops bound for France. They carried the virus with them.

Spain got the name only because its uncensored press reported the outbreak freely while Allied nations stayed quiet under wartime censorship laws.